The tax cuts deal: Yet another reminder that Obama can’t escape Bush

Obama’s promise to reverse the tax cuts reflected a broader belief among Democrats that the Bush years were a bizarre and in essential ways illegitimate aberration, a period of panic and greed the errors of which Obama would reverse in a series of swift and decisive strokes.

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Yet the tax compromise is just the most spectacular — and to Democrats, infuriating — element of a broader trend under a president who ran as the leader of the counter-revolution. It is the domestic counterpart of Obama’s early decision not to repudiate and investigate reviled Bush national security policies such as indefinite detention and warrantless wiretapping, but to refine and embrace them…

“The fact that these have been identified as right policies by an administration that has [had] a knee-jerk response that if Bush promulgated it, we have to be against it — it’s a recognition of how sound these policies are and how necessary they are,” Rove said, in a POLITICO interview.

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